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Monday, 31 August 2015

The strain was beginning to show. In a smart London hotel
suite, surrounded by a chaos of scattered papers, books, empty whisky glasses,
Oliver Sacks was decidedly grumpy. No, more than grumpy: he was angry. January
1990: at the end of a week immersed in round-the-clock interviews about his
latest book (Seeing Visions, on
deafness), Sacks was faced with yet another publicity chore. I felt I was
sitting with a man ready to explode.

He’d already spoken to the Jewish press in Bristol, he told
me – I’d been commissioned by the Jewish Chronicle to interview him – and he
didn’t know why he needed to speak to me. Neither did I. Maybe my helplessness
touched him. Or maybe when I said I wasn’t a journalist, but a therapist and
rabbi, something in him shifted, mellowed.

He spoke about (I asked about) his formative years – until the
age of six he existed within the security of a north London medical family, his
father a Yiddish-speaking G.P. in Whitechapel, his mother the first Jewish
woman elected to be a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons. In this Orthodox
household “the Sabbath bride was welcomed in”, he said, “I always felt there
wasa sense of mystery when I saw my
mother’s hands hovering about the candles.”

War came, and evacuation to boarding-school, which “cut me off from family and community and
Judaism”. This “awful traumatic period in the countryside between ’39 and ’43”
seemed in retrospect - this is a man who chose from the mid-1960s to spend 50
years of his life in twice-weekly psychoanalysis – to have generated in Sacks a
great capacity for empathy with his patients, particularly those “subjected to forces
and deprivations which threaten to overwhelm them. I think I had something of
this myself...’evacuation syndrome’ is second only to ‘concentration camp
syndrome’ in its capacity for severe psychic damage.”

After the War, “friends and science were crucial for holding
me together. I developed astrong
passion for science – which seemed to be in a realm above human caprice and
uncertainty.”

The scientist who kept, he said, a Bible by his bedside
peered at me through his gold-rimmed spectacles and smiled, then shrugged
half-apologetically: “I – alas! – am the only member of my family who is
illiterate in things Jewish...I don’t feel particularly Jewish, or English, or
white, or particularly anything else.” I didn’t comment that this self-disclosure
about Jewishness sounded conventionally, familiarly, ‘Jewish’ to me. Yet
something about his sudden diffidence didn’t ring quite true.

Looking back, I wonder if it was what he wasn’t speaking
about that gave rise in me to that doubt: his homosexuality, such an important
dimension of his emotional life but in 1990 not yet acknowledged publicly. In
his recent memoir On The Move: A Life
Sacks recounts how his mother reacted when, aged 18, he confessed that he
preferred boys: “You are an abomination. I wish you had never been born.” For
the rest of her days she never again mentioned his sexual orientation.
Nevertheless – or maybe one can say ‘therefore’ – “her words haunted me for
much of my life”, he writes.

Sacks’s reputation as a writer-neurologist was built on a
series of books, case-histories, combining careful observation, extraordinary
empathy and a translucent prose style: Awakenings
– on patients ‘awakened’ by drug treatment from decades-long trance states,
his autobiographical A Leg To Stand On,
chronicling the psychological after-effects of a broken leg; and The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat,
where, like Freud, he transformed clinical descriptions into literary art. All
these texts explored the margins of human experience: they were “narratives of
survival and transcendence of the soul battling against terrible odds. The
imprisoned and pressurised – but battling and triumphing – soul is something
which inspires me”, he said, “and makes it possible for me to work in the
depths of chronic hospitals.”

But this sense of a man who knew about the soul’s inner
struggle was also palpable in the room: “I feel I have to struggle to survive
myself” he said, disarmingly, “I’m conscious of...” – and he hesitated – “...terrible
forces in me...Clinically, personally, politically, one is confronted with
monstrous impulses and destructive forces, and it is very dangerous to underestimate
their strength”. The history of the 20th century – and the on-going
barbarism in the daily news – is testimony to the sobering reality of Sacks’s
words.

But his writings didn’t venture into the overtly political.
His life’s work – his gift – was to find a way of entering into his patients’
inner worlds not as a detached clinician but as a fellow human being, and to
find a form of words to describe the experiences being suffered or endured or
just lived with. His patients weren’t interchangeable ‘patients’ – they were
people, no two alike, even though a diagnosis might make them seem to be
suffering from the same condition. “Medicine is in danger of treating the
patient as an ‘it’ rather than a ‘Thou’”, he told me: Sacks was the Martin
Buber of the medical world. He wasn’t interested in a patient’s diagnostic ‘conditions’
but in the unique lived experience of each person and the core of creative
potential that each particular person might be able to unearth within
themselves.

The human brain – “this three pounds of jelly”, he once
described it – was a source of endless
wonder to Sacks. And as I sat there with him on a wet January morning in a
swanky London hotel room, watching him impatiently fingering his dazzling
striped braces worn over a T-shirt proclaiming (in Norwegian) support for Tourette
Syndrome sufferers, Sacks suddenly burst out laughing: “Being alive and being
conscious is fucking extraordinary”, he said, and this sensitive and passionate
and spiritually alert Jewish doctor seemed to relax into his deeper self: “The
central feeling for me, and the motivating feeling, is wonder and the sense of the mysterious. Beyond all the problems
there’s always a sense of the immeasurable and the immense. The sense and concept
of eternity is something which I sometimes have, and often need – and which all
of us need. The spirit is undervalued and forgotten in a way that impoverishes
life. The need for praise and gratitude and thanksgiving and appreciation seems
to me central. I don’t know whom to give thanks to, but I have an impulse to
praise.”

As my time with Oliver Sacks drew to a close he found
himself reminiscing about childhood: “A feeling of peace, and relief from the
quotidian and the daily, would come on Friday evening. I used to have a vision
that the Sabbath was not simply terrestrial, but a cosmic event, that the
universe rested and paused every so often. The feeling of peace is essentially
a religious one – certainly something which is easy to lose – especially when
you have twelve interviews a day...”

Sacks was a humanist endowed with a profound religious
sensibility. A secular Jewish mystic. His gift was to find a way of making
real, in his writing and his clinical work, what it means that human beings are
created ‘in the image of God’ (b’zelem Elohim:
Genesis 1:27).